The Steinbrenner Blues
I met George Steinbrenner once – well, sort of. Ed, a guy named Boone (not the one from Animal House) and I were at Yankee Spring Training back in 2004. The weather was kind and the outlook was saucy, for the beer tender was less than attentive and bleach plus flatulence isn’t far off of a chlorine leak. We were at Legend’s Field in Tampa Bay, F. L. Eh. That’s Tampa Florida to you and me kids. It is now known as George M. Steinbrenner Field – there is still debate out there as to whether the “M” stands for “motherfuck you” or just “Mannish,” but it doesn’t really matter.
Dialect aside, it was near the end of some game. We had been consumed hop fermented beverages like there was going to be some sort of BP enforced shortage. I don’t know if it was Miller Lite or if we were much wiser for drinking Bud, but it wasn’t as if we had discriminating tastes. As a matter of fact, after about inning two, I’m not quite sure any of us had any taste in general. I do remember Boone licking a pole at some point until I informed him metal was not a flavor of popsicle.
So, it was about the 7th evening. In case you didn’t know, spring training games can end at any minute. The rules of the regular season road do not apply. If there is a tie, they walk off like a recently freed gimp. If there is a shortage of players, it’s like there is a oompa-loompa exodus out the backdoor past the 6th inning.
On this particular moderately hot day, I had encountered a regular up by the dugout begging for autographs. He sayed sooth to me he’d been coming to train for Spring for 20 years or more. Sir Memory-a-Lot waxed memorial about days of yore – without Zepplin backing him up – when the stars were galactic and the access was easier than that offered by tnaflix.com (don’t search this site if you’re at work, unless you’re employed by Hustler, Vivid or the like). I’m just sayin’. Most importantly – no, he did not buy me a beer – he explained that the one, the only George “The Boss” Steinbrenner liked to appear live and in person outside his box during the later innings of home Spring training games. By live and in person, I surmised he meant that whatever appeared was not a stunt double for his likeness at Madame Toussand’s creepy waxzeum. I figured outside his box meant he either was throwin’ down on Taco Bell or he was tongue deep up in some kitty chow chow. All that fucking stupidity aside, I corrected my uninhibited, frontal lobe injured brain to assess he simply meant that G.M.S. appeared like a late inning vampire at Spring training games. I would have merely delegated this info to the “old foggie off his Tempurpedic” file, but this cat had an aura to him that could only be described as a less demanding, more sentence completing Mr. Mi-Yankee. Believe in Derek Jeterson. Show me, Mariano Rivera! Andy Pettite the fence! Posada you need to work on your form more, eh?
After consuming an enumerable amount of Busch’s bounty, I membered what that salty geezer told me a few hours earlier. I looked up off my left shoulder. This wasn’t as easy as it would have been if his box had been the right field line, because my left shoulder is normal height. Childhood baseball and gaying it up playing tennis has caused my right shoulder to drop like a pirate’s bad eye. You can’t patch a shoulder though. Well, maybe you can. If you do, you’ll be begging for change during some kind of holiday television special in the name of some disease you probably don’t have, can’t pronounce or would fuck a person with. I saw a whole mess of commotion up by a box. It was like watching a bunch of nightcrawlers trying to escape from Four Leaf Tayback. The movement was slow and nothing was trying to stop it. I didn’t know if a cotton candy vendor had took a digger or one of them fuckers flogging the 9 dollar Fried Turkey Legs (BFTL for Big Fucking Turkey Legs) had impaled himself. There was a lot of loco commotion. Then, out of my alcohol induced pseudo blindness, I noticed that was not a G.I.L.F. (Granny I’d Like to Fuck), it was George M. Steinbrenner! O.K., so I’d probably fuck him for season tickets and an all-access tour. I was as stoked as a victim of a witch hunt. I didn’t need G.P.S. to tell me where G.M.S. was because that motherfucker was about 200 yards away.
Ed and I had anticipated his appearance. In theorizing of such, we brought a picture of the side of the Talibarn that has the Yankee logo on it. And by Yankee logo, I ain’t meanin’ some simple interlocking NY. I’m talking the baseball with the top hat and bat, the whole nine. Yeah, we didn’t skimp when we paid about $100.00 to get a starving artist with some form of undiagnosed mental illness to adorn the barn with strategically placed paints. When I saw the function turning into a function in the stands, I grabbed the picture, goozled the remainder of the closest beer to me, kicked the cotton candy off my shoe, ducked under a foam novelty finger alluding to the Yankees status at the top of MLB and tore out. I think the only time I’ve ever ran faster was the time I tried to fuck that chick on the track team.
When I got near the culmination of all the adulation, I surmised what I could see before me. I subtracted one view, cause I was drunk and getting all blurry eyed. I soon realized I would have to climb over some peeps to make it to the summit of Mount Steinbrenner. I noticed one of my adversaries had left a ¾ filled swill. I guzzled it without inquiring as to what strain it was, threw the glass down, and burped like a freshly uncorked Homer Simpson. I threw myself amongst the throng of Yankeemanity, and began my attempt to summit Mount Steinbrenner.
I found a young, rather nubile young fellow at the very begging of my journey. He was kind of sickly to be honest. I mean he didn’t have fucking Polio, but I wasn’t for sure if he’d completely beat the smallpox – if you Wikipedia that you’ll find it funnier. He was like my Sherpa stepping stone. I put my right foot on his back, my left on his little tiny head, pushed and jumped like a participant in some sort of Harlem Globetrotters dunk contest. This pushed me about ½ the way towards the summit. All that was left betwixt me and the summit was a couple of young children with drool holding their potentially autographed fare , which was stuck to their face with ever-sticky drool, and a couple of bags older than Methuselah’s scrotum. I realized I needed to employ something like a spider-two-legged-push off. I put my right leg on one yute’s braincase, my left leg on the shoulder of the other booger eater, and my nuts on their grandmother’s forehead. I thrusted with more power than I had since the last time I was under 21, when I was trying to get my room deposit’s worth at a shitty hotel. This tactic worked. Whereas it forebagged that ole hag, it put me ahead of the crowd. I was now the next in line for a signature blessing of the Yankee equivalent to the Pope.
Then whoever the hell it was had gotten whatever the hell it was signed, and begged off to the left. It was all me like Alicia Keys. I mean hell, if Bob Dylan mentions her in a song, I can allude to her in some bullshit I think up. I looked up and my savior was sporting sunglasses that would make Maverick look like a bobblehead. If those things were any bigger, he could have taught a shop class. I mean seriously, just because you’ve been to the police academy and trained in riot control, it doesn’t mean you have to wear the gear out to meet the public. But, the bestest of the best was the fact that he was wearing a hat. Not an officially licensed, MLB approved hat. A hat in the vein of something you got free for showing up at the “Crappiethon and Bait Expo”. It had an unbent bill, and the front was foam. Like sound proof, looney bin quality foam. It was emblazoned with the all caps in yellow against the navy blue background “TOP GUN”. I have no idea if G.M.S. was trying to say he fucked Kelly McGillis or that he was tight with Kenny Loggins. I never heard him mentioned in Footloose or Caddyshack for whatever it is worth. The bill also had a rope across the front of it, like it would have provided something to hang onto if he was on the Deepwater Horizon at the wrong moment.
So, there I was. My drunken self within touching and talking distance to my version of the Pope. He was wearing a funny hat. I would have accepted a kiss to my finger. There was smoke present but that was from a hot dog stand in the proximity. I didn’t hear any chanting, but that was probably cause whoever was batting was not an easy out. Kneeling was not an option as my love lobes were already freshly implanted on granny’s billboard. However, in the midst of all my wonderdum, I merely offered up the picture of the Talibarn’s side and requested a sign of proof that it had been viewed and approved by G.M.S.
I handed it to him like I was some sort of little girl asking him to sign for the fucking Tag-A-Longs I had just sold him. He grabbed it – Sharpie in hand – and viewed its depiction. With what I’d described as a chuckle, he said “Where is this?” I said, “On the side of the Talibarn in Paducah, Kentucky. We are militant hick Yankee fans. Thanks for everything you’ve done for us.” With this type of significant showing, I thought I might get some above average sign of approval. Or, at the very least, my own TOP GUN hat. Nah. He merely signed his name, handed the picture back to me and signed whatever Gonard Granny offered up.
I wasn’t mad at G.M.S. He was a fucking billionaire. He owned the Yankees. I was a hick lawyer from Paducah. He could have killed me by simply having his bank account dumped on me. G.M.S. was very cool to sign my stupid fucking picture, and it was cool he got a laugh out of it. It was even better that he didn’t require me to be circumcised, almost drown or be hit in the face with a garment. I was lucky to have been within that close of proximity to the savior of the core beliefs I once had forced on me, but had come to love as I ventured into adulthood. This picture is framed and in the Talibarn if anyone wants to call bullshit. If I was there, I’d take a picture and send it to our beloved blogmaster to post along with this loonacy. However, due to the constraints of transportation after consuming alcohol, such cannot be produced at this particular junction. So, put a black band around your sleeve and get on with it.
Oh, who the fuck am I’m trying to kid? G.M.S. was cool and I am severely grateful for what he did for the Yankees, but who the fuck cares what I think? I am but an obstinate blood vessel on the cock of the Yankee Universe. G.M.S. or the Yankees have no fucking idea I exist. G.M.S. knew I existed for one brief moment, and he also knew the Talibarn existed. That, my readers, is the fucking point. Who cares if they know you exist? God or any of those sandal following fuckers didn’t know you existed either. If you exist, you believe they exist and – unlike shit told to you by books with tabs, yellow stained pages and leather covers – you can prove they exist, then you got yourself something that is existent during your existence to give a fuck about. Caring about shit that really is out there – even if the “out there” does not know you are “out there” – is what being here is all about.
Fuck the X-Files. Believing is being out there. If it is really out there and you believe in it, than you believe in something knowing believing is believable. Yeah. Break out a box of Fruit Loops and figure out what that means motherfucker.
JIS
RIP G.M.S. I hope you fire whoever is in charge of hell.
